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David StoveDepartment of Traditional and Modern PhilosophyUniversity of Sydney

Popper, Lakatos, Kuhn and Feyerabend occupy leading positions in Western
philosophy of science in this century. To them we owe the prevailing view
that scientific knowledge is never true (nor even probable), and never
false (nor even improbable). Even the best scientific opinion, at any
time, is nothing more than an unjustified conjecture, a socially-imposed
dogma, or a fashionable gestalt.

Some consequences of this attitude to scientific truth verge on the
lunatic, and David Stove demonstrates how irrationalists turn the trick
of concealing absurdity by a variety of logical and linguistic devices.

He then examines the etiology of the irrationalist thesis, and traces
the fatal conjunction of empiricism with perfectionism back to Hume:
`Nothing fatal to empiricist philosophy of science follows from the
admission that arguments from the observed to the unobserved are
not the best, unless this admission is combined, as it was by Hume,
with the fatal assumption that only the best will do'.

In this business-like declothing of philosophical emperors, he performs
a valuable service for all students of philosophy. By exposing the
`frivolous elevation of the critical attitude into a categorical
imperative of intellectual life', he resurrects a philosophical basis for
holding that, for example, Harvey's theory of the circulation of blood
was right, or that Ptolemaic astronomy was wrong,
or that scientific knowledge has advanced over the last four
hundred years.

For non-philosophers and others who have always held such views, David
Stove provides a lucid and amusing account of an extraordinary movement
in the history of ideas.